While Congress struggles with a legislative program, the White House, two federal departments and the electric power industry have jointly begun an effort to better assess cybersecurity risks. The “Electric Sector Cybersecurity Risk Management Maturity Project” is designed to utilize the insight of private industry and public sector experts to build on existing cybersecurity measures and strategies to create a more comprehensive and consistent approach to protecting the U.S. energy delivery system.
“Establishing a comprehensive cybersecurity approach will give utility companies and grid operators another important tool to improve the grid’s ability to respond to cyber security risks,” said Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
This initiative, which will build on existing cybersecurity efforts by the Obama Administration and the private sector, will focus on establishing a “maturity model” that allows utility companies and grid operators to measure not only their current cyber defenses, but also their vulnerabilities. Such models generally embrace a graduated approach — usually through five steps — for moving from minimal capabilities to complete optimization of a management process. Maturity models, which rely on best practices to identify an organization’s strengths and weaknesses, are widely used by other sectors, notably in software engineering, to improve performance, efficiency and quality.
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